Kiwi Farms ruling sets “dubious” copyright precedent, expert warns

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Kiwi Farms—a website credited with launching a range of targeted harassment campaigns, which Cloudflare considers its most dangerous customer ever—has remained online despite immense pressure to dismantle the website. But now it looks like Kiwi Farms may be facing its biggest threat yet. This week, an unexpected court ruling has shown "how copyright law could be a Kiwi Farms killer," tech law expert Eric Goldman wrote in his blog.

Goldman's blog analyzed a judgment issued Monday by the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which reversed a lower court's decision to dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed by Russell Greer. According to Greer, Kiwi Farms targeted him with a harassment campaign so extreme that he wrote a book to explain why the harassment should stop. Kiwi Farms then uploaded the book and a song that Greer wrote, allegedly sharing his copyrighted materials to encourage users to continue mocking Greer.

Greer's troubles with Kiwi Farms started when he sued pop star Taylor Swift in 2016. That's when Kiwi Farms users "began 'a relentless harassment campaign,'" Greer alleged, including “direct harassment via phone, email, and social media." Kiwi Farms' “schemes" allegedly "successfully got him fired from his workplace and evicted” and led to "the creation of 'false social media profiles that impersonate him with names ... that mock his physical and developmental disabilities.'” Kiwi Farms frequently targets people with physical and mental disabilities, Greer told the court.